That still would not help, Mathilde like all of the Empire thinks the lizardmen are savage beasts squatting in some old probably elf cities. Lustria would not indicate 'lizardmen' but less 'Old One' or give some insight into the above.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
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That still would not help, Mathilde like all of the Empire thinks the lizardmen are savage beasts squatting in some old probably elf cities. Lustria would not indicate 'lizardmen' but less 'Old One' or give some insight into the above.
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I don't like that I have to constantly remind the thread that it was the Imperial Treasury guy that said this:
And that Mathilde never gave her reaction or expressed her opinion on the matter. She's never expressed denial or affirmation of Lizardmen being beasts because she hasn't had much cause to think or muse about it. Boney has to mention Tichi-Huichi a half dozen times in the thread for people to remember that the Lizardmen's relations with humans aren't all completely hostile. I'd like for the simplification of Lizardmen relations to stop.
Well she did not deny the notion that they are beasts and frankly I think it is more reasonable to think that she holds with the common opinion of her polity that is only challenged by one obscure mercenary company that has never been mentioned in the quest.
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Not saying no doesn't mean yes. It just means that she didn't say no or yes. I'm not going to interpret Mathilde's opinions on something simply because she didn't deny it.
The Lizardmen have been a lot less violent towards Swamp Town than just about any other polity in the setting would be if the Empire founded a city of looters and poachers within their borders without so much as a "may I?". They're certainly strange and little is understood about them, but the same is true to varying extents of all the other foreign powers. They might be harder to talk to than a Bretonnian, but at least the Lizardmen have never tried to annex Marienburg.
The default assumption that nonhumans can't talk or think is one that wouldn't really take hold in the Empire, not when it has Dwarves and Halflings and Elves and Ogres and sometimes the goats grow arms and try to pillage your cities.
The default assumption that nonhumans can't talk or think is one that wouldn't really take hold in the Empire, not when it has Dwarves and Halflings and Elves and Ogres and sometimes the goats grow arms and try to pillage your cities.
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There's a reason that the Norscans have been able to survive roughly 1600+ years on the coasts of Lustria in the form of Skeggi. It was because they realised what the Lizardmen were after and they were smart about seeking out their treasure. Losteriksson realised that the Lizardmen wanted plaques when they invaded his town and he decided to throw all of his loot and plunder outside the walls. The Lizardmen picked up the plaques and left all the gold, letting the Norscans retrieve it and allowing them to live another day. Ever since Losteriksson told all his followers to never venture deep into the Jungle or pick up plaques, and it has allowed a degree of coexistence between them and the Lizardmen despite their treasure hunting. The Lizardmen dislike Daemons, but Skeggi apparently don''t get up to a lot of Daemon summoning? Or if they do it's far away from home.
Norscans are often simplified as a people, but they've been on the coasts of Lustria surviving and thriving for about 600 more years than all the other inhabitants of the Old World. They also trade with Marienburg and Erengrad, so I don't see why humans in general would be ignorant of some of the stuff Skeggi figured out in 1600 years of coexistence.
Norscans are often simplified as a people, but they've been on the coasts of Lustria surviving and thriving for about 600 more years than all the other inhabitants of the Old World. They also trade with Marienburg and Erengrad, so I don't see why humans in general would be ignorant of some of the stuff Skeggi figured out in 1600 years of coexistence.
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Mathilde is not a Norscan, he has never laid eyes on a lizardman in her life. Personally I think any thread of information that has to pas though the mouth of a norscan trader, then the port of Marianburg, then make its way into the empire will be at best one rumor among many.
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I have a suspicion that Mathilde has never seen an Arabyan either. I doubt she would be shocked to see me speak.
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[extremely picklepikkl voice] Actually, one came to her talks on the Waaagh.
There's almost certainly Arabyan's in Altdorf as there's regular trade between the Empire and Araby.
That is not actually true, she saw one at the Waagh and Peace lecture, also it's a little glib since you know Arabyans are humans who are automatically assumed to be sentient. On the other hand when you get into beings called lizard-men... well humans in warhammer are not really inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to beings they find strange, not saying they are right to do so, quite the opposite, but that is the setting we are working in.
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I was distracted by the scantily clad woman, but I will grant you that she has seen an Arabyan apparently.
I don't think Mathilde goes out much. She seems like a "stay in the library" kid.
Mathilde knows Goat people can speak. She would have zero assumptions about Lizardmen not being able to speak. This isn't real life, this is Warhammer.
Indeed they can, speak debased Dark Tongue and smash Waystones good, which comparison does not bode well for the place where all this started which was that we would recognize the place of the Lizardmen in the making of the geomantic web
For the sake of not moving the goal posts since I hate it when other people do that in debates to me, I do accept that 'not sentient' is a wrong assumption, it is more likely that she thinks of them as 'not possessing complex civilization'.
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You do realise that people can choose to not have an opinion on a subject? Why do you assume that Mathilde would jump to conclusions about a race that she knows next to nothing about instead of her shrugging and saying I don't know?
I agree that it would be unlikely for Mathilde to figure out the involvement of the Lizardmen easily. I just don't like the way you're just assuming that Mathilde's view on an unknown society is to be automatically reductive and xenophobic.
Mathilde has spoken to a Wizard who has seen a Slann in action. She owns the books of an Elf that took rubbings of Lizardmen plaques. She is friends with a giant sentient lizard. She wouldn't be able to make the jump from Lizardmen to Old Ones, but she absolutely would not hold the default assumption that they're subsentient. And I also reject the idea that that would be the assumption, because just about every corner of the setting is bursting with sentient nonhumans. The Empire knows for a fact that there are civilizations on every other land mass in the world, why would they think Lustria is an exception when they have first-hand information about beings that use weapons and cooperation? And second-hand information from about a dozen different sources that outright say, 'yeah, they're a civilization, don't piss them off'? At the very worst the Empire might think they're closer to Beastmen or Orcs than humans, but both of those are existential threats to the Empire, so if anything they'd do the opposite of writing them off as below consideration if they thought that.
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I think that most people take on the biases and opinions common to their culture and only change them if challenged. Consciously deciding not to have a position on something is comparatively rarer.
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What kind of cultural baggage is Mathilde getting about the Lizardmen of all people? People don't talk about them or know they exist unless they're a scholar or they've been to the New World. Mathilde wasn't even all that involved in "regular imperial culture". First she was a peasant in a backwards rural community, then she joined the Grey College, which is the least representative cultural space of the Empire probably. Then she goes back to Stirland, but who is she going to be talking to Lizardmen about? She goes to Karak Eight Peaks later. Who's talking about Lizardmen there?
What kind of culture is she inheriting? What kind of bias? The Lizardmen are largely unknown. She doesn't have anything to inherit aside from scholarly sources who can't agree on anything about them aside from their biology because they dissected a Saurus once and the anatomy diagram is in the Library of Altdorf.
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Which would be a distressing thing for the wizarding branch of secret police to do. It'd be like the Witch Hunters automatically assuming that the only good magic-user is a dead magic-user. If Mathilde takes after Roswita, circa Early Quest, in concluding "all Group X bad, therefore Individual-Y-As-Part-of-Group-X is bad," that'd be idiotic of her.
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From this blurb, we know that Empire views Lizardmen as primitive but extremely dangerous, yet still someone they apparently tried to entreat. So, there you go, from Chamberlain himself.
I think both the Empire and the dwarfs start off with a baseline of low key xenophobia when dealing with unknowns like the Lizardmen, though granted in Mathilde's case that would likely be countered by her xeno-affinity trait if she stopped and thought of it. I do not think she has thought about it yet.
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I recall Belegar asking Mathilde to "deal" with some Giant Spiders.
Deal heavily being implied to be fatal for the spiders.
We all know how that really ended.
I agree, hence why I am not arguing that position anymore: